A Critique on Lies of P’s DLC Bosses

A Critique on Lies of P’s DLC Bosses

This game really surprised me with how amazing it was, and I’m eagerly waiting for the DLC to come out this summer, and it’s nice to know that we’re in good hands. It’s been almost 2 years since players first stepped into the role of Jeppetto’s puppet to save the city of Krat from disease and puppet frenzy and lies a P. Yes. Yes. What? What the [ __ ] Well, I guess I don’t get a break. I feel like astounding is the word I would use for this game as a whole. Just everything about it because astounded, surprised, and amazed are what I was consistently feeling when playing this game. In my first video, I talked about how surprising it was for this game to even come out and be as good as it was, especially in a genre like this. But Lies of P Overture has released and has surprised me. Once again, this is already after the base game raised my expectations that I would normally keep in check, but with this game, I had genuine faith that the developers were going to come up with something that was no shorter than great. And for me, they even surpassed that. Liza P’s DLC was the best part of the game for me. Story, levels, exploration, enemy encounters, pretty much everything. And I was really anticipating how I’d feel about the bosses. And as you can tell by the video’s title, I do really like these bosses overall. While I do want to shower these bosses in all the praise they deserve, I want to specifically go over why I think these bosses work so well and try to give any meaningful critiques to areas that I think they could possibly do better in. Any critiques I make towards this game or any other games that I use in the video are out of my love for these games and out of wanting to see how they can improve by discussing my feedback and any feedback that anyone has in the comment section. The ground rules are a bit different this time. All of the enemies with a boss health bar will now be included. I am once again going to be limiting my use of throwables and summons. In my previous video, I didn’t actually account for summons for any of the bosses, mainly because I and a lot of other people don’t really like the way that summons affect the fight. I think summons work best when they are optional and a boss isn’t designed with the expectation that you’ll use summons. They kind of force you into a less engaging fight and usually end up trivializing the boss because the boss will pay less mind to you, but more importantly, they limit player interaction with the boss, which will certainly limit my ability to analyze anything about them. I personally believe that every boss should be expected to be fought without summons and the use of summons are a last resort for people who just want to get past the thing or if people just like the idea of fighting with an airgo clone of yourself, which does sound pretty cool to be honest. Despite how I feel about summons, in this video, I’m going to be changing that just a little bit because there are some bosses where your summon is actually an important NPC in the story, and the game seems to expect you to use them in two different scenarios. So, they will be getting a mention. One last thing, I actually wanted to show screenshots of my stats from each of my classes right before I fought every boss and also explain my mindset when building each character because I think that would be valuable information for some people. If these specifics don’t interest you, then you can skip to the timestamp where the first boss is. So, I embarrassingly forgot to screenshot my stats right before the third boss, and it was a bit too late for me to really include them. But what I do have is the level that I started with right before the first boss and the levels that I ended with. I did do a little bit of grinding in my base game playthrough specifically to level up capacity, but in the DLC, I didn’t do any further grinding. And from what I remember, I didn’t really lose my airgo all that much, if at all. Let’s start with some things that remain consistent for each playthrough. Like I said, I leveled up capacity quite a lot to make sure that I could have the highest frame and highest plating, and I would use the specific damage type plating that is most effective against the boss. So, against someone like Lexasia, who mostly does slashes, I would use the slashresistant plating. If a boss inflicts a specific type of status, then I would equip the highest converter or the highest cartridge, and I would unequip them if I didn’t need them. I would never sacrifice the frame or the plating. I am fairly certain that my levels for each of my playthroughs are rather high except for this one, which I’ll explain. I think this is due to the only amount of grinding that I did in the base game to get a high capacity stat and then I just leveled up my stats like normal from there. So, just keep that in mind when I talk about a boss’s health or damage. The only exception is my Monod Rose Sword playthrough, which I actually had a much lower level than my original New Game Plus playthrough because of me not completing the game yet in this one. I also generally tried to avoid using the defense amulet, but I looked back at my recordings and realized that I would forget to unequip it from time to time. I even did a couple of silly things like forget to unencrypt my critical hit amulet and my critical hit sharpener when switching to a weapon that doesn’t actually have an eight crit chance. But these are uncommon. My builds aren’t exactly 100% optimized, but they’re about as optimized as someone with the experience of playing Dark Souls 3 five times and Elden Ring three times. Now, on to specifics. For my motivity build, my stats were pretty balanced throughout the whole playthrough. He generally felt the tankiest one to me. And when I was playing him in the base game, he was consistently and surprisingly the easiest playthrough despite him always being my first one where I was less comfortable fighting the bosses with. In the DLC, he felt rather balanced. He still felt strong, but most of the other classes were noticeably more OP, while my motivity playthrough was mostly just comfortable. I always fought with my Motivity playthrough first because generally heavier weapons require a bit more finesse to use properly than fast weapons. So, I wanted to try to use him first to see if I’d struggle to use heavy weapons against specific bosses. Despite me using really big weapons, I actually didn’t have to level up his capacity all that much because I was purposefully remaining in the slightly heavy load to see how he would fare that way. and you don’t really need a high capacity stat to stay in that load. I also ended up leveling up his stamina a lot and also using the stamina increasing amulet because of how much stamina I would need to expend to use these weapons. Technique is a bit different. Both my technique and motivity class were kind of fighting each other for the position of weakest class. In my technique build, I actually needed more points in capacity in order to keep him in the normal weight load. I also ended up spending way less points in vigor because stamina wasn’t much of an issue on this class. I actually ended up having the highest damage stat in the end, but he still didn’t really feel all that powerful. He felt strong, but nothing really compared to these next ones. For my advanced playthrough, I did things very differently. I don’t know if this was the most effective way to make an advanced playthrough, but it was what felt the most fun for me. I would always, of course, use the status that the boss is weak to, but I would also use the status they are neutral to, if they had one, before getting the anguished guardians amulet, which I will talk about. Once a boss is procked with a certain status, there isn’t too much of a reason for you to keep using that status while they’re afflicted by it. So, I just thought, may as well proc another status while I’m waiting for the other one to run out. Also, procking one effect makes it harder to proc the same effect again. So, I generally liked using multiple status effects to continuously have the boss afflicted by something, but that mindset ended up changing once I got the nightmare amulet, which skyrocketed my damage when I use the same effect they are afflicted by. Advance gets disgustingly broken with this amulet and the one that increases status buildup. My advance playthrough in the DLC ended up being arguably my most damaging playthrough. It was honestly stupid. Another thing to keep in mind is the weapons that I used. I would only use weapons with innate status buildup because I don’t really like the ones that give you the little sharpener effect when you use the fable art. and I felt that I was able to get much more damage out of the weapons with innate buildup. Now, in terms of stats, he actually had the highest capacity stat, which gave me less points to spend in other places. I was also in slightly heavy load because of me using two weapons most of the time. Now, there’s both my new game plus playthroughs. This one is the one from my previous video and this new one that I dubbed Legendary Stalker. The only real notable thing on my first New Game Plus playthrough is that I wanted to use Carlo’s most iconic weapons being the dragon sword, the golden lie, and the proof of humanity. And my legendary stalker playthrough uses the Monod rose sword. I ended up favoring one specific damage stat on both playthroughs just so I wouldn’t have to split them between both. So, because the dragon sword uses technique, my original new game plus sword has a higher technique stat and my monod sword just uses motivity because screw it. My legendary stalker playthrough actually had the lowest level, but it still ended up being by far the easiest and arguably most damaging because of how broken this sword is. With all of those done, we can now finally get started. Up first, we have the tyrannical predator. Once again, Liza P is starting us off with a very strong first impression that sets the tone for the rest of the whole playthrough. The first thing I want to mention right off the bat is that this boss does not actually have a fog door or a spirit pool, which if you remember from my previous video, this quality only really existed for the mini boss encounters like the mad clown puppet and the walker of illusions. But now I am forced to go against my previous rule of if it has a fog wall, then it’s on the list because this guy is certainly up to par with the main bosses. The fact that this guy isn’t in the boss rematch is a bit confusing to me. I mean, this guy is so unique. He doesn’t fight like anything else in the game. He has such a cool design. He has a complex enough move set, and he even has his own boss theme that I really like. I totally believe this guy deserves to be in the boss rematch considering the corrupted parade master managed to make his way in. But I guess this guy unfortunately gets the same fate as poor old door guardian. Now, because of the lack of a fog door in a spirit pool, this boss’s appearance might be a surprise to some people. I mean, when you notice the arena, it becomes pretty obvious that there’s going to be some kind of encounter here, but I was expecting an elite enemy or a mini boss, not a full-on boss. I really like that the DLC plays around with surprise encounters like this. In the base game, it was nice having the comfort of actually knowing when every single boss encounter will be because of the spirit pool and a usually very obvious door. And I mean, that’s fine, but I think with that there is a little something lost. And having some bosses be surprise encounters like this to keep you on your toes is really cool. And your Argo spawns right before his trigger point, just like how it would spawn outside of the fog door, so there’s no risk of losing your Argo from a cheap surprise. Overall, great introduction. His design is absolutely amazing. I really, really like it. I loved the idea of the crotzoo from the start. It gives the developers a pretty creative output to make unique monstrosities from the animals mutated by Argo. And for me, they didn’t disappoint. So, of course, here you are fighting the biggest and baddest animal at the end of the zoo, a giant alligator, which is more like a dinosaur given his size. He still looks like an alligator or a crocodile. I might be getting that wrong. Can post-prouction me correct me if I’m wrong? The little tweaks they made to his design look really nice. I like his more spiky appearance. And he shares some similar qualities to Archbishop, like the many teeth inside his mouth creating a gaping spiky hole, these weird tendril dangly things sticking out of him, and the overall decaying look to him. I really like the design of Lies of Pe’s carcass monsters. They look very unique and really cool. Overall, I really like his design. The sounds he makes are so damn cool. I love the echo they put on his roars. I played this with surround sound headphones and holy crap, it sounds amazing. Onto his actual move set. Now, I think we can all tell that this guy has some pretty obvious inspiration from the golden hippo from Shadow of the Tri. I think this kind of boss archetype is a pretty good one to take from because these kind of long quadripedal monster fights are kind of uncommon and they’re especially uncommon in this game. Although I know a lot of people really do not like the hippo fight and honestly I don’t really like it either. But this fight fixes a lot of problems that I and a lot of people had with the golden hippo. First of all, the camera. Oh boy, the camera. All of the camera problems, all of them have been fixed in my experience. First, and I would say most importantly, when you target the Predator, the camera zooms out a lot, and it also slightly points downwards, allowing you to see the ground more clearly and gives you a better angle on his attacks, even when he goes for his slam attacks. It does leave a little bit of his face out of view, but for me, this is more than enough information to act on. The lock- on point is also closer to the center of his body as opposed to his head, which makes the camera less jerky, and it won’t wildly swing all over the place when he goes for any slam or spin attacks. I’ll be honest, I am very surprised to say that I haven’t had any camera problems with a boss that is so massive. I’ve heard people complain about the camera though in this fight, and I’ve watched some videos on it as well. The problems they had didn’t seem to be related to being too zoomed in or being too jerky, at least from what I could tell. Most people that I’ve seen who have said they had camera problems tended to have their backs be pushed against the wall a lot, which is what causes the camera problems. And here is my counterargument to this. I don’t mean to invalidate everybody who has had camera problems in this fight at all, but I’ve seen a few people be disingenuous about how bad the camera actually is. If you’ve been personally having issues with the camera in this fight, I implore you to more consciously try to position yourself towards the middle of the arena in a similar way that you should be doing with both Archbishop, Swamp Monster, and even the King of Puppets. a couple of dodges through his attacks towards him or to the side that worked for me very well and I feel like it would alleviate a lot of the problems that people had with him. His arena is decently wide and he doesn’t have that many attacks with a huge amount of knockback and the ones that do don’t come out as frequently as someone like the king of puppets. And he also attacks slowly enough which allows you to reposition yourself without having to worry about too many attacks coming your way. or you could just s sideestep or link dodge through any attacks towards the middle of the arena without having much problem. But speaking of his actual arena, I didn’t know where else to fit this, but his arena seems to have uneven ground, which oddly makes the red fatal hit circle not able to detect me sometimes. It doesn’t affect his attacks in any way. It’s just that it wouldn’t detect me in the circle, which is weird. This has only happened to me about three times in my total five playthroughs, but it’s just a silly little problem to run into, but it can be kind of annoying if you were building more towards fatal attacks in your Porggan or wearing some of the new fatal attack amulets. Anyways, I found the monster’s move set to be decently complex and engaging. His movements are slow and lumbering with some quick biting attacks to mix it up. Right off the bat, I do kind of wish the bites were a bit more telegraphed. Don’t get me wrong, it makes sense that the bites are fast, and I’m glad they are here to mix things up, but I can imagine the springiness of the hits can be a bit annoying for some people, and they were for me at times. Maybe if the bites were held for just a little bit longer and were a bit more obviously telegraphed, I would mostly want to give the Predator slightly more wind up to the bite. that is still fast and sudden, but one that could be a bit more consistently readable. His slam attacks, though, I feel are very well telegraphed. All of his slam attacks have obvious and deliberate movements to them, and he has a pretty decent amount of them. His slams feel heavy, and they don’t land too fast or too slow for me. The weight of the attack felt pretty accurate to what I would expect from a creature like this, and they were pretty satisfying to parry. They are fairly challenging to deal with at first though, so you have to get used to the slower pace of his attacks, and perfect guarding them is pretty tough in general. But they are far from unreasonable. Just like his bites, he also has a springy delayed pounce attack. I would probably give this pounce the same treatment as the bites and maybe make the pounce a teensy bit slower. It is rather jarring to have such a lumbering and heavy creature move at such a high speed like this, but it’s only for this one move, so it’s not a big deal. He is also rather aggressive, which I think is a good thing. He feels very active in the fight, and there’s very little waiting. He has some fairly long and complex combos. Nothing crazy, though. And he also has really long recovery windows for you to take advantage of, but you have to be careful with it. Whenever you get on one of his sides, be ready to dodge or parry because this one tail swipe is very fast. It is pretty jarring at first, but the animation is seamless and it flows with his combos really well. It also isn’t all that springy, if that makes sense. Although, I did get hit by this one attack a lot. so often that when I was re-watching my gameplay, I was very surprised by how much I was not able to spot this attack and just how many times I was getting hit by it. Maybe the attack should have a bit more of a pronounced windup animation and more of an obvious telegraph. It does become a bit easier to spot once you actually know he’s able to do it. It’s still pretty jarring, but it is predictable. You can even bait a free perfect guard if you move to one of his sides. Being able to bait a predictable attack like this is actually something I found surprisingly common with these bosses that I wasn’t really doing before in the base game. I like attacks like these that feel more reactive to what you are doing. It makes the bosses feel a bit smarter and forces the player to be more engaged and to pay attention to the fight, like you’re fighting an actual creature. I think it adds a pretty nice challenge when done correctly and also potential counterplay if you bait these attacks. Now, his charging attacks are all that’s left. Both of his charging bite attacks are a little bit finicky. The one bite that is a hit instead of a grab. The hitbox is a little ambiguous. It wasn’t really to a frustrating degree, though. I think a bit of ambiguity just kind of comes naturally with an attack like this. and perfect guardian. This attack can feel a bit inconsistent at times, even if it actually isn’t. The ambiguous hitbox applies to the grab version as well. The best way I found to avoid these attacks is to essentially link dodge directly through his mouth, which can look a bit silly and a little bit unintuitive. Having to leap into his mouth in order to dodge this gave me anxiety every single time I had to do it. You could run away from them, but then you risk running into the wall, so dodging through it is generally the best strategy. I was always worried I was going to be caught by the hitbox, but thankfully this is a rather consistent way of avoiding it. Despite being ambiguous, it is surprisingly lenient, and I found this to be very consistently dodged through without much problem. I don’t find the bites to be problematic at all. They are a nice way to switch things up, but I could understand if people found them annoying. All in all, this guy has a very unique set of moves, and I really enjoyed the whole fight. I found this fight to be pretty great, actually. All of his moves come together very nicely. He has a very good range of attacks. He’s not the hardest boss, and I actually found him to be rather easy when returning to him, but he doesn’t have to be super hard as an introductory boss. He’s a really cool looking first boss and a perfect way to close out the zoo. And more importantly, he makes me really excited to see what the DLC has in store for me next. Very shortly after the first boss, we have our true first boss in this game, as in the first boss that drops an actual boss, Argo, and can be fought in the boss rematch, Mariona, the puppeteer of death. I’d first like to talk about the boss’s buildup in the beginning of the game because most bosses in the base game don’t actually get this type of treatment. Of course, some of them did, but I want to highlight Mariona’s buildup. She makes herself known at the beginning of the game, giving her a bit of mystique. We thought this place was abandoned, but yet we hear somebody talking on the speakers, no less, and she seems to be watching us, which is odd. We then hear her again as she taunts us when we enter the greenhouse, and we’re likely going to encounter her pretty soon, and it might make you want to bring this random mouthy person down a peg. It’s a nice way to build some anticipation. We also find out that this character has a history with the legendary stalker, which gives her character a bit more importance. And then when we finally meet her, she gives us some very valuable information about a certain murderous puppet. instead of just having the boss kind of show up and now we have to kill it just because it’s in our way. It’s always nice to have some amount of buildup no matter how small it is. Now onto her design. I do really like it for reasons. Very, very nice reasons, but also she just looks pretty cool in general. She’s really unique looking for a human boss. It kind of makes you wonder why her skin is blue and why she looks like this. Like, is she another successful airgo mutation like Laxasia or was it some other means? The little puppet chair she has is oddly kind of disturbing. I mean, they’re not human parts, but I feel like you just can’t help but think about that. But her chair truly shows how much of a queen she thinks she is. I mean, how much of a queen she is, of course. The maid puppet looks really nice, too. It not only fits the boss’s whole aesthetic, but it also just looks very detailed and unique looking for a puppet. Why the hell is it so thick? I need to know the lore reason, Miyazaki. It reminded me a lot of the puppet that we saw from the first teaser of Lies of P, but I’m not sure if this one is supposed to be similar, but it still looks cool nonetheless. What is also pretty interesting is how she has the same puppet string gadget that Jeppetto has. I always thought this was a gadget that Jeppetto made for himself, but Mariona having one kind of brings in some questions. Her arena is very nice as well. This one might be one of my new favorites. The greenhouse is a very pretty location and sets the mood for the fight. It’s also very wide open and gives you plenty of space, which will be necessary in our fight. But now, let’s finally get to that. Of course, the first thing you’ll notice is that this is a duo fight. And on the surface level, yes, it is, but it’s actually pretty different from what you’d expect from a duo fight. It’s more of a tag team fight, and they take literal turns attacking you. The one who is currently attacking is signified by the color of the string. If it’s blue, then Mariona is attacking. If it’s red, then the puppet’s attacking. It’s a really interesting take on a duo fight. It is pretty common for some duo bosses to kind of feel like one singular entity. In fact, I think this is the ideal way to make a gang fight. You have two separate entities that both have limited move sets but unique from each other. When put on their own, they would both be lackluster, but put together, they cooperate with each other and make one complete boss, which forces a very different kind of approach from the player compared to normal bosses. This fight takes that logic to a more literal degree. Instead of thinking of the puppet as a separate entity, you can think of it more like a literal extension of Mariona’s hitbox and move set. You don’t actually have to juggle them both at the same time. You only need to switch between them when the string changes color. This makes it feel less like an actual gank fight, but something else entirely. It gives the fight a very unique feeling and flow, and I’ve personally never seen a duo boss done like this before. I think it’s great. Mariona by herself has a fairly complex move set. She has almost as many moves as a regular boss by herself, and the puppet has a more limited pool of attacks. Both of them together gives her a varied move set that rivals even the Nameless Puppet. It’s possible that you might not even see all of her attacks by the time you finish the fight. At least I didn’t on my first playthrough. I think her attacks are pretty great overall. The magic orbs are a pretty interesting visual, and they allow for interesting interactions with her attacks. Her orbs allow for both close-range and long range engagements, and they all look great and feel great to dodge. A lot of her attacks are very dancelike and graceful, which once again fits her whole aesthetic and adds for a nice flow to the fight. Her attacks are animated well and are well telegraphed. Most of her timings feel pretty natural with some of the usual minor delays and varying timings to add a bit of difficulty. Her two spinning attacks are a little bit finicky to perfect guard, but I don’t think it’s really an issue. It’s very easy to just block the hit and then regain the HP because of the generous punish window you are given at the end of it. So, I think it’s all right. If anything, I like that guard regaining is actually rewarded in this specific scenario compared to just blocking everything. I like these orb attacks because they force some pretty interesting responses out of the player. At least I found them interesting. This one spin attack looks unsafe to be near, but it actually rewards you for dodging towards her and allows for some free hits. But a bit later, she switches it up and spins two more times, which makes it a bit trickier to get that punish window. but she still leaves you with the same opening. She also tends to use the orbs like boomerangs, which forces you to dodge the followup coming from behind you. Or you could guard it. That doesn’t really make any sense. I’m surprised that other bosses don’t have attacks that come back at you like this. With all of these attacks, I’m trying to highlight how different she feels from any other boss in the game. Although, there is some room for improvement with these orb attacks in my opinion. I’ll get into that later with her phase two. Let’s talk about her HP. I’m going to be talking a lot about HP in this video, so just be prepared for that. This freaking woman is tough as hell. Her HP and defense are rather high, and she actually has a pretty hefty amount of poise for a human. I’m pretty sure she’s only outclassed by Victor and Luxasia and maybe Simon probably, I guess. But luckily, she’s still no match for a giant sawblade. Her poison defense gives you some motivation to actually target the puppet because it’s actually pretty weak. You can break it very easily and when you do, you get a very lengthy stun window for you to damage Mariona as well as having the luxury of disabling their team attacks and also not needing to switch between them for a bit. I really enjoyed this dynamic. It not only makes her fairly generous health and defense easily manageable, it also forces the player to think about their approach to the fight and who they want to focus on. For example, some players may want to only focus on the puppet in order to stagger her multiple times. So, they might be inclined to bring a strike weapon with some form of lightning or decay and bring that puppet destroying amulet in order to maximize damage against a puppet and get more of these stun windows. Or the player could decide to focus mostly on Mariona, bringing the human killing amulet with a pierce weapon and maybe some decay and fire, dealing more overall damage to her. Maybe you’ll break the puppet at least once, and when you do, you’ll get a much bigger reward from that one stagger, and then you might not need another one for the rest of the fight. Or you could just end it right there if you time the stagger correctly because breaking the puppet stalls her second phase until it gets back up. It’s a very nice reward for your skill. Or you could bring multiple weapons and multiple elements that they are weak to and try to spread out your damage equally if you build properly. There are quite a few approaches here which I think is fantastic. Back onto the puppet itself. There is a lot less to talk about with it, but I still think it’s a great addition. The puppet is fairly standard, but it has some tricky timings with its combos. A decent amount of its attacks feel a bit deceptive, like it’s purposefully holding its attacks for an extra roll beat before swinging, just specifically to throw you off. This one little ax kick, I admit, is pretty awkward. The upward swing doesn’t have a hitbox for some reason, and I always end up trying to instinctively guard it, which can mess up my timing. It also has this little upward swing of its maze where it kind of drags it on the ground. I’m not exactly sure why it does this, but it feels like it’s specifically made to throw off your timing. I do kind of wish these attacks weren’t like this because it feels kind of deceptive and in a logical way. Like, why exactly does the kick work this way? Why does it have a trail as if it were an attack but doesn’t actually hit you? And why does the puppet decide to slam its mace into the ground and then drag it across it before it actually hits you? Though, it’s a minor annoyance at worst in a fight that I’m having tons of fun with. The rest of the puppet’s attacks tends to hold a bit longer than you’d expect. So, if you keep that in mind and time your guards just a little bit later, then it’s manageable. Other than that, it does a lot of flying and spinning at you, and it has these cool looking charge attacks that are very satisfying to Perfect Guard. With all this movement going on, you’d probably expect the camera to be utter crap in this fight. And I’ll admit, it does move around a lot and can be kind of jerky, especially because you have to be switching between them constantly. But I’ve always been able to see them on screen just fine, and I can see their attacks clearly, pretty much at all times, which for me is the important part. Switching between them felt seamless and intuitive to me, and I found it to be very fun. Finally, onto her phase two. There isn’t too much else to add with it. She gets a couple of combo extensions, but more notably, she gets access to her ultimate attacks. These attacks look great. They add a really good spectacle to the fight. Seeing this for the first time kind of caught me off guard a little bit. All of them have some pretty challenging timings to them, and they’re all very satisfying to parry. And when you do, you get rewarded with a huge amount of stagger, a potential hit stun, or even interrupting a follow-up in some cases. I think it’s a great idea to have attacks like this that have more direct rewards for guarding them. And we will see attacks like this later. She has one last ultimate attack that brings me back to what I mentioned before about improving these orb attacks. I’ve said her orbs are fine for the most part, but there is one issue that I personally have with it, but it’s honestly debatable whether or not it’s even a flaw. It’s more like a personal gripe, but I want to see what other people have to say about it. Some of her attacks are really easy to space out, like too easy. It feels like a decent amount of her attacks weren’t really accommodated for you just walking away, even when you think they would be. It kind of reminds me about Laceia’s little flailing fit that she can do. Except Mariona’s case is not nearly as silly looking as that. My first example is this one rapid attack where she turns her orbs into freaking blenders while sauntering over to you. This one is really easy to just step back and stare at her. And I don’t really know how to feel about it. I mean, I’m not complaining that much, but I feel like it doesn’t really make for a very good attack. It isn’t a super long attack, so at least if you decide to just step back, then you aren’t waiting a huge amount. And of course, there is the option to just use a ranged attack on her, but I feel like it shouldn’t be this easy. I mean, look at this. Look at me literally burning her with my freaking firearm, and she’s just kind of still walking at me. And don’t even get me started on using the damn shotgun arm. If you’re having trouble with her, use this. I promise it’ll help. This isn’t the only example, though. There’s also one of her ultimate attacks. This one was where I started to notice this trend. She tends to do many of her attacks too far away from you, and some of them don’t feel like they have much accommodation for distance. So, you just kind of have to wait for her to be done or just throw yourself into the attack, which most players wouldn’t really do. I think it would be great if she could change the distance of her spears based on how far you are away, forcing you to engage with the attack at a larger distance and also making it much harder to escape. Or another good solution would be to make the puppet pursue you much harder if you try to get away. The puppet kind of does this already, but I’ve noticed it only does like one singular slam and then just kind of flies away from you. And you can even space this attack out too. Like sometimes it just won’t fly far enough. I think these two attacks that I mentioned look awesome, but I wouldn’t mind if they were a bit more dangerous. But all in all, it’s not really a big deal. These are mostly just things that I’ve noticed in the fight that I think could be improved rather than blatant issues that ruin the fight. I really like her second phase overall and I love this fight in general. I thought it was a really fun fight and a very interesting twist on a duo encounter. I like that the DLC plays around with some gimmicks like this and they make for some really interesting fights. I really enjoyed this one. I liked Mariona’s character. I found alternating between their two move sets to be fun. And I loved seeing them mix their attacks together and what it did for the fight. Seeing a unique gimmick like this executed so well makes me even more excited for what the DLC could possibly have for me next. I thought I had no rival beyond Leia. It should have been the two of us locked in a fight to the death. My mind is unraveling. It burns. My mind’s a blaze. Make it stop. So, here we are already breaking the rules that I set in the first video once again. But trust me, it’s for a good reason. My reasoning for not including the human fights on the previous list was because I didn’t find them interesting enough to talk about to the point where even if I did include them, all I’d really have to explain is just the move set of the weapon they have and any possible relevance to the story, which not all of them really had. They generally had few moves. They reused a lot of moves from the player. Not all of them have music or any significance to the story or a compelling arena to fight them in. And to be honest, most of them for me were just flatout annoying to fight for one reason or another. So now, as you can tell by their inclusion, I do find these fights in the DLC to be interesting enough to put on the list. In fact, they’re actually quite good. This fight in particular really caught me by surprise. Not only by the suddenness of you being thrown into it, but also just how much fun this fight was. Beforehand, you get a small amount of buildup to Verinique’s fight. It’s pretty cool hearing her in the distance before finding her and gives us some motivation to seek her out. You rush over to help her only to find out that she’s completely lost it and attacking everything in sight. I think they’ve done a good job with her character. Her design is decently unique. It is just another stalker battle, so they’re severely limited in this regard. The goat mast, her bulky armor, and her larger frame conveys her as a battleh hardardened leader very well. Her weapon is sick as hell, too. A great hammer with a thruster that she can use for fire damage, which I need to complain for a second. Why can’t we use this weapon? I’m upset. The first thing that crossed my mind when I saw her was my mind. Oh, hello. Oh my god. What the What the [ __ ] What? What the hell? Holy [ __ ] She’s so fast. What the [ __ ] And then the second thing was, “Oh, I really want that weapon.” But it’s not in the damn game. This is like Eldest Brother not dropping his giant buster sword when you beat him. Like, but I want it. I don’t plan on actually factoring this into my ranking of her begrudgingly. Anyways, her having a unique weapon does add a lot to the fight and makes her feel more like a real boss. As demonstrated by my level-headed analysis that you saw earlier, her move set is crazy. I really like it. When I first encountered her and she started charging at me, I was genuinely thrown off balance. Well, figuratively. I was spamming the guard button, the dodge button, everything. just trying desperately to react to everything she was throwing at me. She’s super fast, aggressive, and has really long combos and has the most satisfying spin attack to perfect guard in the whole game. Eat your heart out, eldest brother. I was too harsh on him. She is absolutely insane and panicinducing, but she didn’t feel excessive. you’ll find out that her punish windows are actually decently long, and despite her large frame, she’s actually pretty susceptible to being flinched, which allows you to play aggressively. This was an incredibly fun duel. There isn’t too much inherently wrong with her fight, but I do have some notes. Her arena is a little bit cramped, just like with most bosses that have this issue. It isn’t unbearable. Positioning herself towards the middle definitely helps, but I found her arena to be more of a problem than most bosses. She does have a decent amount of attacks that have a lot of push back. So, if she decides to do a bunch of these back to back, or in some cases, just one singular spin attack can force you into the wall without much that you can really do about it. It is mostly avoidable, maybe closer to like half the time. It’s really shaky. She does also have a decent amount of moves lifted from the Nameless Puppet. Her being a stalker battle after all kind of gives the expectation that she’ll fight similarly to the player. I think it would be nice if she had a completely unique move set, but this is a small footnote in the whole fight. I think all her new moves are good and she has enough original moves to make her fight feel unique. She has a lot of fire-based attacks and some other combos that no other human fights have. Her fire attacks add a little bit of a positioning element to the fight, which I really like. I like that the DLC is playing around with unique attacks like this that forces you to deal with them in a different way other than guarding and dodging. While I don’t particularly mind just simply eye framing through every single attack, it’s always nice when a boss has a couple of attacks like this to switch it up. I don’t think it’s necessary for every boss, but it’s appreciated here. Damn, I really want that weapon. She’s a solid fight overall. The one thing that I want to highlight the most is just how much better this fight was compared to any other stalker battle. This isn’t just a step up. This fight is in a completely different league. So much so that I feel I can hold these fights up to the same level of scrutiny as other bosses in this game. I wouldn’t call this the most substantial fight, but it was so nice to see just how much they’ve improved with these. Forgive me. I did. This guy is a bit of a doozy, but in a good way. The two-faced Overseer looks like a pretty simple boss on the surface level. He’s a big dude with a big axe, but there’s actually a pretty decent amount of depth to him. First, his design is really neat. From what I understand about him, he is the remains of an ancient warrior that the alchemists found and began to conduct experiments on him with the purpose of turning him into a living weapon. He has a nice little intro of him exploding a carcass before you actually enter the room, which shows off his brutality. His arena looks almost like a jail cell and gives the fight a feeling of a prison cage match, which is cool as hell. This guy was wreaking havoc in this facility, and other important characters are telling you just how much of a menace this guy is. It even gives context to his freaking giant spinal axe being made out of the bones of his victims, which is pretty metal. It gives you more of a reason to not let him escape this prison. He’s a perfect mix of dystopian science experiment and a boss that you find in Dark Souls. One thing that I absolutely loved about Liza P’s narrative in the base game was the slow and gradual change to a more fantastical setting and theme. You start with the desolate mechanical steampunky streets of Crot to an abandoned cathedral crawling with monsters to an actual swamp full of poison with a giant green monster at the end and finally ending on a literal castle on an island surrounded by mystical blue energy with the final boss attempting to use this energy to become a god. It leans more into a fantasy setting without completely losing its original dystopian and industrial feeling, which I think is a really cool development of the world that made every single subsequent area more exciting in my opinion. Overture is actually very similar in its progression of each of its levels, and you get to see this slow change once again, which I would say the only exception is the very last area. And I think this guy is the first turning point where you start to realize this change to a more fantastical setting. His move set does his design some incredible justice. His attacks are super heavy and powerful. The insane weight and impact of every hit. Feels incredibly satisfying to perfect guard. This guy honestly has some of the most fun combos to guard and dodge through. He reminds me a lot of my beloved champion Gun Deer or the goat John Godfrey Elden Ring. All of these fights almost make you feel like David and Goliath just taking down a behemoth of a man. The Overseer’s combos are incredibly complex. They have a really good range of speeds and has quite a few moves to keep the fight fresh. He is very, very aggressive and leaves little downtime, and his combos are decently lengthy, but he does have very long punish windows that make the fight feel fair. He has some of the smoothest feeling and well telegraphed attacks that I’ve seen in this game. Each one has a very distinct arc, speed, and weight, and they’re all very challenging to avoid, but they don’t feel unfair. He has some attacks that are very delayed, but I don’t find them to be much of a problem. This one attack where he drags his ax along the ground can be pretty annoying to get the timing for. Admittedly, it can sometimes be annoying to Perfect Guard, but after seeing it a couple times, I felt like I was able to respond to the animation pretty normally. The moment he’s about to swing always felt pretty distinct to me. The animation is pretty gradual and isn’t very snappy. pretty much all of his delays get the same treatment. Just because an attack is delayed, that doesn’t inherently make it bad. Sometimes a delayed attack can look natural with the enemy’s animation and force the player to stay on their toes and pay attention to the fight. Delayed attacks, when used correctly, can give the fight a unique feeling and pacing. Delayed attacks mainly become problematic and annoying when they are overtly deceptive in their animation and timing. when you feel like an entity is purposefully slowing down their attacks to throw you off or to just throw an awkward wrench into the pacing of the fight. As if the enemy just knows this is a Souls game that he’s in. So, they can severely delay their attacks knowing that us, the player, can’t do [ __ ] about it, and we will likely be thrown off by the awkward timing. When in an actual fight, a delayed attack like this will just get you. Yeah, delayed attacks can get annoying when they are overused and constantly force you to act against normal human responses, essentially pulling you out of the game and out of your flow state, and forcing you to consciously think about the enemy’s weird and unnatural timings that don’t make any sense. At worst, it could distort a boss’s aesthetic profile, or in the unfortunate case of someone like Luxasia or the iconic Marget stickold, the animation could just look goofy as hell on top of getting a cheap kill on you. In the case of the two-faced Overseer, I felt that a lot of his attacks were slow, but they felt slow in a way that felt natural with his weight and fighting style, which not only helped me get used to them easier, but it also kept a consistent flow to the fight and therefore a consistent flow state while keeping his aesthetics perfectly intact. So, I personally do not believe that his delays were problematic. They didn’t feel overtly deceptive to me. They felt more like he was reeling back his weapon farther than normal because of how heavy it is and how much power he was trying to put into his attacks. And his animations didn’t suddenly double in speed or become super floaty and weird. And because of all of this, the Overseer has some of the most fun fight pacing I’ve ever engaged with in this game. It makes his duel very fun to engage with for me. What elevates this boss to a higher status and makes it much more interesting in my opinion is the enraged mechanic where the two-faced in his name comes from. Every second time you flinch him, the boss gets red and he gets enraged. This gives him some new moves, makes him much more aggressive, and makes his already lengthy combos a little bit longer and faster. Perfect guarding these are the highlights of the boss for me. This is genuinely some of the most fun I’ve had guarding these attacks. I think this mechanic is pretty interesting. You basically have a second phase for him that he switches to every now and then instead of just you killing him and then the phase change happens. I’m almost kind of surprised that I haven’t seen other bosses do this. It works really well. Although, when this happens, you’re going to be feeling Yeah. Where this boss gets a bit shaky for me is with his health and damage. This guy has a ridiculous amount of health. And he hits not like a truck, but a [ __ ] freight train, even compared to later bosses. It almost feels like you’re fighting someone with new game plus scaling. This can be problematic because it can make them feel a bit overtuned. But despite this, I didn’t feel like it was unmanageable. His attacks for me, while being pretty challenging at first, felt pretty easy to get used to, and I found myself being able to parry him very naturally and get into a flow state with him. So, him having a lot of health gave the fight a bit of an endurance challenge. Kind of like the scrapped Watchmen did for me, which I did like, but his health is pretty damn high, and it can make a fight last a very long time. It’s a good thing that I was really enjoying the fight, though, so I didn’t feel like it was dragging. It’s more like it just lasted a long time. Now, on to his huge damage. Oh my god. He is a bit too punishing at times. Having to deal with his large health pool for so long just to get two shot by him would be pretty frustrating. There are ways to circumvent his damage kind of. On all of my playthroughs, I made sure to have enough capacity to wear the highest frame and the highest plating. And you also have other options like the defense amulet, the health amulet plus one, the blue butterfly amulet, and even just leveling up your health a crap ton or using the new consumables. All of these solutions are pretty easy to find, so most of these players will have these, maybe bar the consumables because of limited supply at this point in the game. But even with all of these, he was still doing a really uncomfortable amount of damage. So imagining the damage he does without all of these seems a bit absurd. So on one hand, I wouldn’t mind if they lowered his damage just a little bit because leveling the hell out of capacity and vitality and having the players run with the defense amulet isn’t something that I’d want to force on players. But on the other hand, there is one important thing to this fight that I feel would be lost because of how much damage he does to you. It makes it very important to break his weapon. This is something that I really, really like. In my experience, I never really get the chance to break most boss’ weapons because they usually don’t attack frequently enough or they just die before I can do so. And if I ever do end up breaking their weapon, it usually just happens at the end and does pretty much nothing but guarantee my win. I like that this one boss actually pressures you to break his weapon. And with how many hits his combos have and how aggressive he is, I do feel this is intentional. I break his weapon in every single fight with him and only when he was about at half health. You get such a rush of relief when you do so. My goal with this point is to encourage more discussion on the topic of breaking weapons. I personally really enjoyed actually feeling pressured to break his weapon because it was a new experience and no other boss encourages this mechanic in this way except for eldest brother kind of. But he doesn’t really do all that much damage per hit and also he doesn’t have a lot of health so it usually just end up the same as every other boss. But on the other hand, I could understand if people thought his damage was a bit too much. I’m not exactly sure in what way they could go to appease both sides. Maybe lower his overall damage, but to make armor less effective on him, so he’s not one-shotting you, but at the same time, you can’t just level up your defense enough to face tank all of his damage. But I’m not sure how well this would work in practice. I personally like the way he is, and I’m perfectly fine with him staying that way. I think there is a pretty obvious reason as to why this guy’s health and damage are so high, and a lot of you probably will know, too. Oh, yeah. Now, we’re actually going to be talking about summons for once. In this fight, you are kind of very much extremely encouraged to summon Alidoro to help you. So, I think they ramped up his damage and health to compensate, and fighting him without Alidoro does make you feel at a huge disadvantage. For me personally, I didn’t mind this. I went into the fight expecting to be at a disadvantage and still found him to be a really fun and fair challenge, but I could understand if people would want his health and damage to be lowered a bit. Having to run face first into an enemy that feels this overtuned. And your option is, well, you know, you could always summon Alodoro if you need the help. If you can’t do it yourself, you stupid [ __ ] I don’t think it’s good for a fight to force you to use summons because despite what they have done to this boss to compensate for you using the summon, the boss still doesn’t really feel like he was made for summons. Soulslike combat generally support one-on-one encounters, and the AI is pretty much never designed to properly accommodate for multiple players, which is why fighting with a summon usually results in a steamroll. Fighting him with Alidoro messes with the pacing of the fight. It also makes it ambiguous as to who he’s attacking and makes the fight very easy. It turns the match into basically a beat the piñata fight as expected. But the point that I want you guys to come out with is that I personally didn’t feel forced to summon Alidoro and I ended up having a really enjoyable fight with the overseer riding solo. One last point about the summon that I want to give credit for. Having Ali Doro as the summon replacement is awesome. This is the first fight to have an actual story character as your summon, and I absolutely love that they chose the real Ali Doro to do this with. Actually, seeing the real Alioro in action is really cool. What I did on my first playthrough was to fight the boss for most of his health and then just to summon Alidoro at the end just to see him in action and get the story beat. This fight was honestly great overall and was so up my alley. He has a couple flaws here and there, but I really, really enjoyed him. Huh? A carcass that took off bombs. That thing looks stronger than I’ve seen before. Oh, you have got to be kidding me with this. Out of all the bosses they could have reused, they chose this guy. This [ __ ] guy. You know that before they made this, they were like, “Hey, you know what would be funny? Reusing the green monster of the swamp is the closest the developers could get to actually trolling their own community, and I love that. Now, on to the fight itself. It’s okay. In all seriousness, it is pretty neat to see the green monster in a premature state. It’s pretty interesting, and it’s nice that we get to learn a little bit more about him. From what I know, the swamp monster is in fact another experiment from the Alchemist. He was created in the Zeodor lab and was designed to easily dispose of puppets, which is where it’s got its hunger for airgo from. It’s a nice little detail about him. Now, to be brutally honest about the actual fight, and this will sound pretty harsh, he’s the most forgettable boss in the DLC and arguably the whole game. His fight comes off as that one time that you randomly fought the green monster again. Like, oh, hello you. Well, that was a thing I did. It doesn’t help that on my first playthrough, I actually beat him on my first try, so I didn’t really get to learn much about his new move set. Not that I want this particular boss to be really difficult, though. What I will definitely give some credit, though, is how you find him. He’s not a main boss. He’s an optional secret boss. And in that context, he actually does work pretty well. You do kind of have to lower your standards just a little bit, but honestly, for a secret boss, I think he’s pretty neat. You have to find him by paying attention to when you hear the scream on the elevator and then you find out that you could drop off at this little cave where somebody oddly left their shot put down here. Interesting. Out of all the items, this one is by far the funniest one to find randomly lying around the world. Ah yes, somebody must have dropped their shot put here. Perfectly normal. Now I can use it to help me kill a god. The Hunter’s design and arena are both incredibly similar to the swamp monster, as probably to be expected. His arena is cramped and has some broken puppets scattered around it. Back onto the subject of boss reuse, I do think this is a pretty good execution. It’s similar to how I felt about the corrupted parade master. He’s given a tweaked design and a tweaked move set instead of just being dumped here with the exact same moves. He does have enough moves in his fight to feel different. I do like his two little cinematic grabs. Absorbing our HP into his. It ties into his lore of being a monster that feeds on Argo. Because he’s smaller, he is naturally much faster and the pace is faster overall until he smacks you with some pretty jarring delayed attacks. These ones I could hardly get the hang of avoiding. I think because of how sporadically they appear in the middle of his combos when you would expect him to mostly be fast is what causes me to miss. It is kind of a skill issue, but it’s just not something that I find very fun to deal with. In the previous fight, his delays were held for an egregious amount of time, yes, but those delays are part of one singular combo, which I felt made it more predictable and also reactable, and less frustrating to deal with overall. But these ones just feel really awkward and just throw a huge wrench in the pacing of the fight. It’s like his combos get you into a fast-paced rhythm, which makes me prepared for more speedy attacks only to suddenly delay one just specifically to catch me off guard is kind of what I don’t particularly enjoy about these attacks. It feels like the game itself is purposefully trying to mess me up. Like you have to uncomfortably go against your instincts. It does sound pretty simple to not do this. I mean, just remember the timing, right? Breaking this kind of behavior is much harder than you’d think it would be. and usually doesn’t really feel good in practice. His fight is kind of all over the place if I’m being honest. He’s even more chaotic than the original green monster and lacks any form of flow or attack patterns. It is a pretty neat trait for him, I guess. And it’s not like he does a whole lot of damage, so he at least gets away with not being too frustrating, per se. But I felt that I couldn’t really get a hold of this fight and have meaningful engagements with him. One thing I find kind of funny about him being faster is that his charging attack, which was a gripe for me in the original fight, now feels more consistent. His fast combos can be pretty satisfying if you nail the timing. So, at least there is that. But if you’ve been leveling up at a fairly consistent rate, the fight will likely be over before you feel like anything really happened. It ends as suddenly as it appears. I don’t think he’s bad, though. He’s flawed, yes, but I don’t hate this fight. He mainly just feels a little more underwhelming and sometimes a more annoying version of the original green monster with not too much else going for him to be brutally honest. And that really makes it sound like I dislike him more than I actually do. But the thing is, I honestly just don’t have a whole lot to say about him in general. His move set is okay overall, but flawed. and his design is neat, but there isn’t too much else to him. He’s certainly not a bad boss. He isn’t as flawed as most bosses, to be honest. I just found him to be rather lukewarm. He’s a decent secret boss, which I feel like is the highlight of him. Randomly stumbling on him is pretty cool, to be honest. He is very okay in my eyes. [Music] Oh boy, my jaw was dropped when I saw this guy for the first time. Just what the hell is this thing? And I thought the designs couldn’t get any crazier after Simon or Archbishop, but this guy takes it to the next level, and I love it. His design is one of my new favorites in the game. Is he out there and a bit out of place? Maybe a little bit, but in my opinion, no. After seeing bosses like Archbishop and Simon, I can believe a guy like this appearing in the game. He’s a human from the past mutated beyond belief by Argo and after years of torture from the alchemist. There’s also some lore implications about him being some kind of mystical warrior of the sea, but I don’t really know too much about that. So, if you couldn’t tell by his design alone, this guy is a rather unique fella. And his fight is too. To say the least, it is unlike anything that you’ve seen in this game so far. Take a drink every single time I’ve said that about a boss in this game. He’s our first enemy at a size this massive. We’ve seen some large bosses before, but nothing on the same level as High Lord Wolnir or any of the dragon fights from Elden Ring. I think it is awesome to have a fight like this in the game. It really does make you feel like such a badass taking him down just like it does with From Soft’s titles. Now, I mean this with no hyperbole. The tortured guardian is the most fun I’ve ever had fighting a colossal boss in any Souls game. Yes, including that one. And that one. Oh, that one’s really close, though. While I did enjoy Bale Spectacle more, I preferred the gameplay of the Guardian. It not only avoids the many pitfalls that a huge boss could bring, but it also manages to be unique as a colossal fight. His arena is huge and looks awesome. And my god, his music. This one track is very unique. It sounds closer to a Dark Souls boss. It’s honestly fantastic and fits the boss perfectly. This guy’s fight is obviously the slowest on this list, but surprisingly, he isn’t door guardian slow. His normal attacks feel less delayed, and he has a couple of fast mini combos to switch it up. His attacks honestly feel great to dodge and parry. bar one, but I’ll get to that. His basic swipes are slow and heavy, but he has a nice flow to his swings, and the fight has a pretty nice slow rhythm. It is something that you really need to get used to, but I think his attacks are well telegraphed, and they feel very satisfying to avoid. They’re not too slow or too fast, and it makes them feel very nice and consistent. his little fast combos with the trident can be tough to deal with at first until you realize that it’s always a followup from one of his larger hits, so they don’t just randomly come out like a cheap sucker punch. Each swing of the combo gradually increases in speed, and it’s pretty satisfying to learn. They’re pretty easy to predict and offer a nice little change of pace to the fight that isn’t too jarring. His spear attacks, I feel, are decently well telegraphed, too. But there is a minor issue. I’ve noticed that these attacks come at you offcreen most of the time. I do have a minor problem with this, but I don’t think they’re unmanageable. His animations are pretty deliberate. You’ll see him raise his head and upper torso up high when he’s about to plunge his spear down, so there is at least a telegraph for it, but it’d be better if you could actually see the spear. I found myself able to get used to it once I knew how to spot it. But keep in mind, I also didn’t have much of a problem with Simon’s weapon being offcreen. while I know a lot of other people did. So, take that for what you will. In both cases, ideally, you’d want to find a way to make their weapon on screen as much as possible. Of course, there is some amount of leniency to this that I feel is tolerable, and I think the anguish guardian spear is more forgivable than Simon’s case. I can understand if other people thought these attacks were annoying because you can’t see them. There were definitely some times where these attacks got me because I couldn’t see them. It just didn’t happen often enough to a point where I found it to be a huge problem. If these attacks were to be changed, I’m not sure how the developers would go about doing this without just completely redesigning the boss. So, I’d rather keep them the way they are. But besides that, one thing I do kind of like about the spear attacks is how it tends to emphasize your positioning. Sometimes it might just be better to move yourself to a spot where the spear can’t hit you, like directly in front of his face. The spear is consistently avoidable this way. the spear will generally hit behind you and you won’t have to deal with it as much. Or oh boy, yeah, this one. Okay. Yeah, this one attack where he swings both his trident and drags his spear. I do like that it emphasizes your positioning, but if you happen to get hit by the trident, it’ll sometimes send you directly into the spear, making you get hit twice. It’s fairly uncommon. Common enough to be worth the mention. I don’t know if this was intentional or not because it feels a bit overly punishing for one mistake. The damage on both attacks feel balanced around being hit by one of them. So, I think it is a bit much. It can result in some frustrating deaths. But back onto the camera, it is once again well behaved. It zooms out even more than it did with the tyrannical predator. And all of his attacks, aside from the spear attacks, are visible on screen. Sometimes it can move a bit weirdly, like when he walks over you like this, but it actually isn’t all that disorienting or hard to figure out what’s happening. I mean, he’s just walking over your head and getting behind you. I am honestly really happy that I don’t have to be fighting the camera during these fights. His fury attacks are really delayed, but I found these to actually be quite fun. The speed of his falls feel natural and land very consistently. It’s challenging to get at first, but it feels fair and very satisfying to pull off, except for this one in particular. Here is the one delay that I have an issue with. It isn’t even his longest delay, but the problem that I have is the speed of the actual slam. The animation makes him look like he’s moving in slow motion compared to the rest of them, and it looks kind of awkward. Kind of like the door guardian where he was moving in a way that kind of seemed like he was at 50% speed. I got hit by this one a lot and it’s rather punishing. I think it’d be better to speed up the actual slam to make it look a bit more natural, but this is the only attack that is like this and the only one that gave me a problem. All of his moves come together very well. He has a lot of variation and it makes him a very fun, challenging, and badass fight. He has a pretty short face change that looks awesome. He doesn’t change too much. He mainly powers up his spear, but I love this cut scene. Seeing the same ghostly blue arms that are present in Simon’s face change look really cool. [Music] His move set doesn’t actually change all that much. He has a medier laser. He has a [ __ ] mad deer laser. You’re actually serious about this? They actually did it. I can’t believe it. I never would have thought. I never would have thought that Liz of P would have an attack like this. This guy is just surprise after surprise. Everything he’s done so far has thrown me off balance, and I’m loving every second of it. Uh almost every second. His laser is very consistently avoided with the link dodge. Whether you’re light, medium, or slightly heavy, the laser is very clear and stays on screen, and it shoots at you in a very predictable pattern. This fixes something that I’ve always had a problem with these big laser attacks. I do really like every iteration of these attacks. They look really, really cool and they’re very interesting to react to and dodge, but I’ve always had an issue with the laser coming at you from far offcreen and forcing you to kind of vaguely guess when the laser will actually reach you, if at all, depending on where you’re standing. This fixes that while keeping the spectacle. This attack hits super hard and can one hit you if you don’t have a lot of health, but it feels fair to dodge most of the time. There is one catch though. Sometimes, albeit rarely, he can use his big laser right away when you’re really close to him. It can feel a bit cheap at times. It’s not unreactable, but he can sometimes use it when you’d normally be safe for a punish window. The laser can start up and shoot faster than some weapons can recover from. Most of the time, he’ll back up when he decides to shoot the laser, and this would avoid the cheapness of it completely if he did it every time. I’m not entirely sure why he doesn’t do this all the time. It’s not too bad, though. When you know how to spot it, it does give you a noticeable window to avoid it, albeit a little bit small. But the main annoyance from it is that it can deny you a punish window occasionally when it would normally be safe. But another notable thing that comes from his phase 2 is his new spear attacks. He uses his spear more often and some attacks leave behind these little particles that explode into these magic strikes. It takes that little positioning point I made earlier and adds more to it. I like that the game is delving more into the magical properties of Argo. His shockwave attack looks cool and it forces you to either a run away from it or if you’re feeling ballsy, time a dodge as it goes off, which will net you a huge punish window. While it also looking a bit silly, like how the hell does he actually dodge that? I like that this big attack has an easy and safe way to avoid it, but also a more risky and more rewarding way to avoid it. Overall, he gets a pretty small change in his second phase, which isn’t a bad thing. His move set is varied enough as it is, and the new attacks he got are meaningful. Now, I’m going to use this phase to talk about his health. Once again, I told you I’d be talking about it a lot. This guy is very tanky, but he doesn’t feel as tanky as the Overseer to me. It’s kind of weird because technically he has more health. I don’t know if his defense stat is different or anything, but the overseer felt noticeably more tanky and did a lot more damage. There was just something about him that took longer to beat him than this fight. The Overseer felt more tanky to me, but I can’t exactly prove that. Just like before, this could end up potentially being a problem because it can make the fight drag on a lot. I imagine players will be fighting this guy for a very long time on their first playthrough, but I think his huge health pool works for him for a few reasons. First, there is the usual with bosses like this. He attacks super slowly, so most of the time you can hit him mid combo fairly easily, and you can rack up a lot of damage on him very quickly. And he has very long punish windows. He gives you tons of opportunities to attack him, which is one thing, but there are also mechanics built into him that allows you to deal more damage to him quicker. I really like this idea. And here it’s executed very well. He has crystals on his face and on his left hand, which you can break. Breaking the one on his hand gives you a really long attack opportunity right off the bat. And then when you guard his fury attacks, he will do this animation of him falling, which nets you a bunch of more free hits. These are both great rewards for a skilled player that can break the hand very quickly. And then breaking the one on his face gives you well, you know, [ __ ] amazing cinematic fatal attacks. I love these. I’m actually happy that they use these pretty sparingly because if something like this were done more often, then it would probably lose its cool factor. The animation makes you feel like such a badass. It also does a lot more damage than a normal fatal attack would, and it even opens him up to be hit more after you’re done with the animation. I really like this weak point mechanic. It’s an interesting way to deal with his large health pool. I think all of this is executed very well, and with enough skilled play, you could whittle his health down at a comfortable rate. Not quite at a fast rate. Unless if you’re a new game plus and you’re using his amulet. This thing is [ __ ] disgustingly broken. Look at his fire damage. Holy [ __ ] [ __ ] What the hell? I personally don’t have a problem with the huge health pool. If many people really find his health pool a problem, then I think a good fix for this could be to add another weak point for the player to break. Even if they just added one on the other hand that does nothing but net you another free lengthy attack window. I think that would be fine enough. Just a suggestion, but I personally do think he’s fine where he is. He also doesn’t do a whole lot of damage. He does a lot, but he doesn’t feel like he’s blatantly a new game plus scaling now. So, you aren’t quite at risk of losing all your progress in an instant. Aside from that one double hit, there is honestly very little for me to complain about here. Zero out of 10. Worse than godskin duo. How dare you deny me the fatal attack. Out of all fatal attacks. If I had a nickel for every time I clipped into a boss during a fatal attack opportunity, I’d have two nickels, which is not a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. All in all, this fight was awesome. It has its flaws, yes, but for me, they felt pretty minor in the whole fight. It feels like a mix of a traditional fight and a spectacle fight. This was a really fun fight for me. The visuals, the music, the mechanics, the pacing, the uniqueness, all of it makes this the grandest and one of the coolest fights in the game. Why, hello there. More surprise encounters. Nice. Lumakio makes his grand entrance to catch us off guard with another stalker boss fight. The stalker battles generally lack any form of spectacle or crazy cool design, so little stuff like this really adds to them in a very nice way. The little betrayal plotline here is great. It was hinted at many times in the DLC that Lumakio was up to something and acting rather suspicious, so seeing that paid off with an actual boss fight is pretty great. Lumakio’s fight manages to be very unique from other stalker battles. Just like Verinique was, I really enjoyed this fight, but it definitely came with some growing pains. This guy is really tricky, and his timings are incredibly strange. Most of his attacks are more delayed than you’d expect them to be, and they feel pretty awkward to perfect guard, like he’s trying to swing just ever so slightly slower than normal just to throw you off. and then of course throwing in some sucker punch swings to surprise you. His swings aren’t delayed in the traditional sense. He doesn’t just hold his weapon in the air for two minutes and then suddenly springs it onto you. It’s more like his swings have a generally slower speed than what would look and feel natural. His animations to me looked a bit more floaty than what I’d expect. Of course, this is just how I felt about it. While I don’t know if I can say that I liked the delays here, they aren’t really problematic and I was able to get used to them after a while. It was kind of like how I felt about Fuoko’s delayed attacks where I was able to enjoy his fight in spite of these types of attacks and I felt like I was able to get used to them because he does these delays rather consistently. His swings do offer a pretty unique flow to the fight that you can get used to and it makes him feel oddly unique. I think these types of swings were supposed to add to his overall trickier move set. He has a few tricks up his sleeve. He can use his umbrella to block you. He can quickly throw mines at you, and he can use smoke grenades to obscure his next attack. Most of these you are unable to escape via positioning, so you actually have to be very precise with your guards and dodges, and he is very punishing if you mess up. A lot of his attacks can potentially combo you into others. Most human fights only have one other type of attack to accompany their main move set, like the owl doctor’s throwing knife or the white lady’s counter, but here, Lumakio has several other attacks other than just swinging his umbrella at you, which I really like. He dodges more often than Verinique, but doesn’t dodge too much to the point where you’re only able to hit him one time at any given point. I actually really prefer this about the DLC stalker battles. Fighting a player type enemy that can consistently dodge you is rather annoying. So, I like that these bosses don’t dodge you very often, but they’re given more HP and poise to compensate for that. It makes them feel more like a regular boss. Lumakia was the hardest stalker fight for me, but I started to like that about him the more I fought him. He was honestly pretty tough and tricky, but it made him very unique. Although he does lose a point for not having a unique weapon, but at least I can’t be mad now about not [ __ ] getting it. There is of course one other surprise for us that he has. When you get about a quarter of his health down, he drinks this elixir created by the alchemist that heals him. Oh boy, you just [ __ ] up badly. If that elixir is what I think it is, then wait. Yep. Oh, hell yeah. We get a phase two on a stalker battle. I am all for this. Being thrown into a second phase in a stalker battle is pretty unexpected and cool. I have been genuinely surprised about most bosses on this list, and I think that is awesome. This phase change does some weird things to the fight. All that stuff about trickiness and strategy that Lumakio uses. Throw all of that out the window. Lumakio becomes much more frantic and wild with his attacks, which is a huge contrast to what he was doing before. I do technically prefer the first phase pacing, flow-wise, and just how the fight feels, but I like this change a lot for story reasons. Lumakio is confused and panicking, and that reflects in his new move set. He is all over the place, flailing, spinning, stumbling, and he’s much more aggressive, charging directly at you with very little strategy. I like his new move set for the story context, so I think it fits him pretty perfectly. I’d say it’s debatable whether or not this phase is actually harder than the first one, but to be honest, it doesn’t really matter to me. I think the change is pretty neat. His combos are much longer. He attacks you more often and he becomes much more unpredictable. This can make him feel more difficult for some people. He leaves many more openings for you and also tends to flail around a lot and miss you. That might make him easier for other people. Fighting him in this phase was still pretty fun and he felt very different from his first phase. And I liked the contrast with his first phase. I think his dialogue and voice acting are great and the story here all around is really good. The story is something that I would say improved greatly in the DLC as a whole. The characters have been great so far. Both Lumakio and Verinique really surprised me, not only in their appearances, but also with just how great their fights were. These fights show a lot of improvement from the previous stalker battles. I love seeing this game grow and improve, and so far I believe the DLC has been the best part of the game for me. Now, let’s see how that will translate to the final boss to cap things off. No, I was chosen. Oh my god. Oh boy. Here we are. Okay. When I was writing this, I honestly had no clue where to start. The amount of emotions I was feeling in this fight, it was honestly something that I genuinely wasn’t used to in these games. There is so so much for me to go over and this one was by far the most difficult one to script. You better strap in because this is a long one and it starts with the base game. So, buildup. My god, the story and buildup to this boss was probably the best in the whole game, and I don’t think it’s close. It has one of, if not the best buildup to a boss that I’ve personally ever seen in a Souls game. This guy was such a good villain for the DLC. And it all starts in the actual base game where there are hints at a murderous puppet that went on a rampage in Crot. You see it in some writings and some items in game. But most notably, we get the name of the murderer from Venini, whose parents were killed by Arleino, who we only knew as the king of riddles at the time. He used to be a murderer. It brings up a lot of pretty interesting questions for some detail that seems pretty small. Like if he was a murderer, how did he become the king of riddles? How was he stopped? How did he end up in Arch Abbey? But that is actually the only amount of information that we got about him because he wasn’t exactly super important to the present narrative of the base game. He was only really important to Carlo realizing his own humanity and the humanity of puppets in themselves. So, they chose to expand on this character in the DLC, which I think is pretty cool. It was so cool to get to learn about both of these characters that the DLC revolved around. We learned that Arleino has a general contempt for humanity and his murders gave him an obsession to study humans. He sees his murders as an art form and he relishes in the terror he causes. He is driven solely by revenge and blood and he really enjoys it. Being a puppet with the ego of a murderer awakened within him who was so powerful that only Leia who was a particularly powerful stalker was able to beat him and earn her the title of legendary stalker. knowing about this guy’s past, how crazy he was, how evil, how powerful he was, that it gave our own teacher, her main title. It raises our expectations of the boss a lot and gives us some amazing, really, really cool anticipation. After his defeat, his main motivation is revenge on Leia specifically. So, he ends up capturing her apprentice and our best friend Romeo. This gives us playing as Carlo a decent motivation to seek him out and to follow Leia to save our best friend and our master’s apprentice. Seeing Leia’s pursuit of Arleino knowing that she will likely not win due to her being infected by the petrification disease, it was honestly really emotional. Seeing her struggle really made me want to help her and of course the motivation to rescue our pal Romeo. It almost acts as a little redemption for Carlo who misunderstood and unfortunately killed his best friend who became the king of puppets. He’ll get to save him now. During her pursuit, we learn more about Arleino himself. From his artwork to these audio recordings that he left us. My god, listening to these was really disturbing and honestly really cool. [Applause] Being left in the dark as to what exactly he’s even doing on the other side, leaving it up to our imagination is fantastic. starting now. [Applause] But it actually turns out that he was in the middle of making his latest creation of Romeo’s arms on the Valentina statue that we find in the Rose estate. This was pretty surprising and also harrowing and grim. Seeing Leia’s expression to this also was just rough. I’m going to [ __ ] kill this guy. I mean, I might have killed Romeo, too, but you know what? Whatever. This is horrific to see the arms of her apprentice like that. Yes, thank you, Jee. I couldn’t have deduced that without your Sherlock Holmes level of observation. Anyways, hearing the title screen music as we run through the Rose Estate Massacre, seeing the work done by Arlino himself, all the people he killed, we originally thought that the Rose Estate incident was caused by the petrification disease, but it was a massacre orchestrated by none other than Simon Manis. Seeing all of this gave me so much anticipation for this guy, I could hardly put it into words. I was so ready to finally see him and take him down. We rush our way to the rose garden, a very fitting name. And we hear Leia and Arlino actually fighting in the background. Everything here is so genuinely amazing. His story with Leia is fantastic, and it not only elevates Arlino as a boss, but it elevates Leia’s character as well. We get to learn all about Arleino, his personality, his motives, his work, his brutality, his strength. We hear his voice, his mannerisms, about the things he did. We hear him in the middle of doing brutal stuff. We finally get to see him. And oh my god, this guy’s design. I am so giddy about this. His creepy smile, the ripped skin on his face, his realistic eyes. He even dresses nicely, which gives him some contrast. He’s just so damn uncanny. It’s so good. The voice actor is amazing. He brings this character to life, and I don’t think they could have picked a better person for the role if they tried. He gives the best vocal performance in the whole game. Not like this. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It It might be a tie. You are so going down. This is where the power fantasy in a Souls game comes from. The fact that Arlino literally does not know who we are or what we’re capable of. I was so excited to give him a surprise by how strong we are. The fight starts incredibly abruptly after the cut scene. And who might you be? Oh, okay. Both of you just menacingly walking towards each other. His music is my favorite boss theme in the DLC and one of my new favorites in the whole game. He has this sinister, really creepy sounding evil theme to him. It isn’t grandiose and over the top yet. That’ll happen soon, don’t worry. It just starts really unsettling first. The choir, the violin, the clock ticking, cuz the song is called Minutes to Midnight. It’s so damn good. [Music] And now we can finally fight him. His move set is so insane in a figurative and literal sense. His movements are incredibly erratic and weird, but they feel oddly precise at the same time. He hits so incredibly fast and he has some of the most challenging attacks to parry. Despite how insanely fast this [ __ ] attacks, he actually has some pretty lengthy recovery windows for you to take advantage of. So at times it’ll feel like he’s relentless, really fast, super aggressive, and has extremely long combos. But to me, he didn’t feel super excessive, and he won’t punish all your time perfect guarding with an instantaneous evasive that resets the fight to neutral. And of course, if you’re perfect guarding, which you’re going to be doing a lot of, you’re always being rewarded by building up stagger and interrupting his combos with a predictable flinch. The amount of hits he can throw at you can vary a lot. He can sometimes extend his combos depending on what you do or if he just feels like it. Sometimes you’ll get a punish window after one attack, or you’ll get a punish window after two long combos that ends in a fury attack. or you could trigger his heal punish and extend them even further as an extra punishment for healing too close. It can sometimes be pretty ambiguous when he’s actually done attacking, but to me it wasn’t bad or blatant enough for it to be problematic. It adds variation and a bit of unpredictability to his fight, which is necessary and present for pretty much every boss. I felt that I could react to his punish windows without needing an ungodly amount of memorization or needing to be freaking clairvoyant in order to actually predict his punish windows. And of course, having the perfect guard allows for bosses with high uptime like this without it being super frustrating. It feels like you really need to work hard for your attack opportunities, and he is very punishing if you mess up, but he doesn’t feel unfair to me. He also doesn’t do all that much damage per hit, at least in his first phase. I felt like I really had to make a lot of mistakes to actually die from him. Granted, you can make a lot of mistakes very quickly and can result in a lot of quick deaths, but at least to me, it feels fair. He can’t combo you or stun lock you into multiple hits. Every time he hits you, you’re able to bring your guard back up. He doesn’t have any super punishing hits aside from the delayed fury attacks, which for me were actually the easiest attacks for me to perfect guard. So, you aren’t going to be cheaply wiped out instantly unless you’re intentionally turning yourself into a glass cannon or not leveling up your vitality or increasing your defense. Even then, it’ll still take quite a few hits to actually kill you. I think his combos, recoveries, and damage are a great balance for a final boss, especially for one that is a DLC final boss. Of course, he’s going to be on a completely new level of difficulty. The timing on both of his fury attacks are pretty strict, but both of them look pretty natural to me. Let’s start with the slash. He obviously telegraphs his weapon by reeling it back really far and then swinging with all of his power, but the hit itself isn’t super springy. You can properly see the arc of the weapon and time it. The swing is a little bit more delayed than what you’d expect, but it still felt very good to parry in my opinion. The same goes for his jumping one, but it tends to land at a much more natural timing for me. It’s very satisfying to land. All of his moves are great, and the pacing of this fight feels very unique and fun for me. Most of his attacks are fast, but they do have a pretty decent amount of variation and timing. None of his attacks are egregiously delayed, and his animations are about as natural as they can be for a boss like this. And speaking of his animations, this guy is the first and only puppet boss fight. Aside from, I guess, Mariona’s puppet, but that wasn’t the main boss. It’s very fitting for the DLC of Pinocchio Souls to end on a puppet fight just like the base game did because he’s a puppet. The general twitchiness that comes with puppet animations is very much present here. His general twitchiness fits in perfectly with his aesthetics, fighting style, and personality. And it isn’t super excessive or frustrating to deal with. It makes sense why he fights like this. And I honestly love the way it looks in execution. It can make it pretty hard to parry him at first, but it didn’t feel like he was unreadable. It didn’t discourage me from fighting him. It made me want to learn his animations and actually figure out the timings for his attacks. He strikes the perfect balance of the twitchiness in the animations, but still being able to actually tell what he’s doing. If anything, it’s more the speed and the difficult timings that tripped me up more than his actual animations did. I found his attacks to be very well telegraphed. He has very deliberate movements to most of his attacks. Although some of them are intentionally tricky, like these little pullback attacks that can catch you off guard. I still kind of like them though. You’ll really want to use the guard regain system to learn these attacks. The smaller and trickier attacks like this generally deal less damage to you, so they aren’t super frustrating. Because this is a strictly parry focused fight, Arlino teaches you to pretty much be holding guard for most of the time to block any follow-ups until you actually learn the timings for them and to use the guard regain as much as possible. What I’m trying to say with this is that his animations were clear and I felt like I was able to get the hang of all of his attack timings and the pacing of his fight, even for the ones that are intentionally tricky. And I really enjoyed the general pacing of the fight. His move set has so much personality to it and really describes Arleino as a character. It’s amazing. He does spins. He flips and branches his weapon. He looks like he’s having so much fun toying with us and causing chaos. And he is really good at it. This guy is really good at making you panic and mess up because of how fast and frequent he attacks, because of how aggressive he is and how hard he pursues you. Look at his little goofy ass run. It fits him so well. It looks silly, but it’s almost kind of freaky how quickly he gets to you. The general pacing of this fight surpasses the speed of the Nameless Puppet. This very much feels like a Siro fight, which I’m all for. This fight along with Nameless Puppet are the only two boss fights that I feel are parry exclusive because of all of his multi-hit attacks. Side stepping is really unreliable here in a way that doesn’t exist in other fights. It’s not impossible to use, but you’ll really need to dodge in incredibly weird and unnatural ways that probably won’t even make much sense in order to actually make his attacks fly above your head. Just like with Nameless Puppet, I do find it very fitting that the final boss forces you to master the more difficult and very, very strict way of avoiding damage as opposed to the more forgiving eye frames of the sideep. Parrying this guy’s combos is so incredibly satisfying, even this late into the game when you’ve done it so many times already. This fight honestly got better the longer I played it in a way that other fights didn’t for me. Every time I died so many damn times, I just felt more and more determined to beat him. Now, health, health, health, health. More about health. He actually hardly has any health in this phase at all. Or at least it feels that way after learning him. And he also flinches quite a bit. After learning him, you’ll likely be able to blow through this phase in under a minute. On my first playthrough of the DLC, I actually managed to get him into phase two on like my third or fourth try, but to be honest, it might have actually been a fluke just because of the health because I definitely started to die a lot more to his first phase after that. He’s the type of boss that can be killed very quickly, but also can kill you very quickly. And it actually works pretty well. I don’t really need his first phase to be an endurance challenge because oh boy will his second phase do that for me and the player is very likely to be dying a lot on his second phase. So being able to blow through his first phase is honestly appreciated. What else is there to talk about? His heal punish. Oh boy, his heal punish. There is some controversy with this one. A lot of people really do not like this attack. I don’t know if this is a hot take, but I think this is a heel punish done right to bring up Elden Ring in a negative light for the hundth time because I have no other good examples. I feel that game gave heal punish attacks a negative reputation because of how they were implemented. They usually just feel unnecessarily punishing and sometimes unpredictable and cheap. Usually when you heal at a distance, this guy won’t throw a black flame fireball at you the very nancond you click the button, but sometimes he will. Man, Rana has this little blade beam move that you’ve likely remember the timing for, but she can artificially speed it up with the same animation, just faster in order to guarantee a hit on you at a distance while you are healing. Because [ __ ] you, I guess, for deciding to heal at a distance while she’s literally doing nothing. And the tarnished base kit feels kind of ill equipped to deal with an input read like this. I think Arlino’s heal punish here is done better for a few reasons. It is only a guaranteed punish if you heal at close range, which you already shouldn’t be doing. So, the solution to this is don’t heal close to him. Period. It does bring in a bit of an interesting challenge because all of those times that you just swig down a flask like two feet in front of a boss and they just kind of usually stare at you and do nothing. Well, now Arlino is like, “Oh, no. You [ __ ] don’t put that flask down.” Here, instead of punishing you for playing the game correctly and trying to heal at a distance, this attack is only a guaranteed hit if you are close to him while healing during his recovery windows. If you heal at a distance, then you can force him to do the heal punish and earn a free perfect guard, building towards a flinch and the eventual white stagger bar. It becomes really predictable once you learn that he can do it and learn the timing. And if he doesn’t do it, then you just heal without any problem. I’ve noticed that sometimes it can take a little bit to register, but once you know that he can do it, it becomes fairly easy to react to and you’ll tend to expect it whenever you actually do a heal. It feels like you are rewarded for smarter play and reacting because you can use it to build more stagger or if you have that porggon upgrade that makes it so that you have a little bit of guard regain left when you heal, you could use it to regain that health or even charge up your fable bars a little bit instead of just being forced to dodge again or at worst taking unavoidable damage because you made the fatal mistake of trying to heal at a distance when the boss is not doing anything. I really do like all of his moves in this phase. This phase was crazy as hell and I really really enjoyed it. But of course, he has a second phase. His phase change animation for me is tied with Romeo’s as my favorite. I honestly cannot decide. I’m leaning a bit more towards Arleino because of his personality. I love the voice delivery here and the transformation honestly really caught me off guard. This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. This and he just turns into the most metal as [ __ ] enemy in the game. The music here is so good and the effects are awesome. and his new design. Oh my god. He leans less into uncanny, creepy, and more full-on horror. It’s a great transition. The Alchemists offered me nothing but you. You’ll offer me something greater, won’t you? He has all this melted flesh and blood all over his body, which implies more than just his face had human flesh on it. And his real body that he was hiding from us. Jesus, he looks so damn cool. He looks so unique and deadly. Who gave this guy dual back buzz saws? Well, this guy did, of course. This dude is literally a killing machine. Now, at first, he looked like he could have been possibly a normal puppet, but just happened to get the awakened ego of a serial killer and was now wearing the skin of one of his victims. But this, he was made with the purpose of causing mayhem. All of the effects here are great. Most of what I’m saying, I bet just sounds like mindless praise because I just don’t really know what else to say. Oh my god, the music here is so good. It has that classic crescendo in the music. You hear it a lot in Dark Souls 3. You know the one. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Yeah. Heat. [Music] Oh, [Music] again. Amen. Oh, [Music] [Music] this guy has goddamn bloodgo magic. Are you kidding me? Is this too much? Is it over the top? Yeah, it is in the best possible way. And I love it. Arlino was enhanced by the alchemist and turned into a killing machine. Of course, he’s going to have some wacky argobased magic [ __ ] going on with him. They needed him to kill the legendary stalker. The alchemist have access to the most advanced technology that Crot has, and they are the most familiar with Argo. I think going over the top with the blood, the effects, and the move set for the final boss is a great way to cap things off. Speaking of that, I love his starting combo so much. I think it’s a nearperfect mix of a spectacle and a challenging attack. I say nearperfect because towards the end, I just end up mindlessly spamming because of how rapid it is. And I don’t know exactly how to feel about that, but it’s still fun to guard. So, I still really like it. I’ve heard so many people have a ton of trouble with this attack, but I’m assuming these are launch day people before all the damage nerfs. In all of my playthroughs, I might have died to this attack like twice, but I honestly don’t even remember. Each one of his hits isn’t punishing in the slightest. Of course, if you just sit there and block, you’ll likely not survive, but if you’ve gotten this far into the game, then you’re pretty good at perfect guarding already. So, I would expect a lot of people to not have too much of an issue with this attack. Well, actually, except for these. These souls honestly suck. I really do not like these things. I really like the way they look, and seeing another iteration of Luxasia’s little parry miniame is pretty fun. And the fact that they even chew through your guard regain is actually kind of cool and makes him feel kind of powerful. But why does there have to be two souls for each hit? It leads to moments where the timing of each hit isn’t distinguishable. If you just stand absolutely still, they’ll hit so fast that one perfect guard is generally enough, but it still feels pretty inconsistent. But if you decide to move at all during this attack for any real reason, then it throws off the timing a lot. Adding the second soul to me just makes the hit feel inconsistent. Honestly, Luxas was way better, but that’s the only thing about the attack that I dislike. At least the lunge isn’t a fury attack. The best way to deal with this is just to dodge directly through it. For me, either using one sideep forward or using the link dodge works really well and allows you to get away from this nonsense that I didn’t even dare to try to perfect guard and allows me to heal or do whatever really. His first two hits always seem to miss me when I avoid it like this. I don’t know if I should feel relieved or annoyed by this. The fury attack is delayed and a bit slow, but it’s really satisfying to land. Then he introduces one of the few attacks in the game that actually forces you to sidestep instead of perfect guard. How does that work? I mean, this works, too, so whatever. This is a pretty neat little follow-up that he can do with some of his attacks, and I really like it. It is just you hitting a different button at the end of the day to eye frame through it. It’s kind of like FromSoft adding attacks that require jumping to avoid. Just a little change that you have to work around that actually forces you to use your whole kit. The effect on this attack looks great and interestingly has the same blood red energy that we only saw with the Nameless Puppet. I wonder what’s up with that. Whenever he does this follow-up, it is very obvious and well telegraphed so you can prepare yourself for a sidestep instead of a guard. All of this was only part of his initial combo that he starts with. Oh boy. Now on to the actual fight. His second phase really ramps up the difficulty a whole lot. Like holy crap, a whole lot. This phase is actually pretty different feeling from the first one. Most of his attacks in this phase have trickier timings to them, but they generally come at you at a slower speed. Don’t get me wrong, the fight is still blazing fast, but the difficulty comes less from the rapidness of the attacks and more from the varying timings and longer combos, which I actually like more for this. If the attacks came out any faster, I might just be spamming the perfect guard mindlessly without any needing to time it. Despite his combos being longer, his recovery windows are about the same, which makes it so that you have to work even harder to earn your attack windows, as it should be. but he still felt consistently punishable afterwards to me. His attacks are really difficult to avoid, but I feel they struck a good balance of making the attacks hard to avoid, but not making them overtly deceptive or overly player hostile, if that makes sense. His animations are amazing, and the effects look so nice. They also don’t block your vision. Just wanted to point that out. I don’t know what it is, but his movements look a bit smoother to me and less erratic, even compared to other puppets in the game. Not sure what that’s about, but it’s appreciated. And it kind of makes sense. He seems a bit more determined to actually kill you instead of just toying with you or playing around like he was doing in his first phase. Most of his minor delays are fine, and they have the same treatment as most delayed attacks in the DLC. The animations still look pretty natural. They mainly just hold for a bit longer than what you’d expect. Nothing super egregious, and they seem to be mostly for more powerful and punishing attacks instead of just throwing delays all over his move set randomly, except for his grab. Honestly, he has one of the stupidest delayed grabs I’ve ever seen. And I’m surprised that this isn’t brought up that much with complaints about him. Like, the timing on this just looks so unnatural and slow. I mean, look at this. He can even change the speed of it. I think it depends on what attack he does beforehand. I I don’t I don’t even really know. I mean, grabs are supposed to be really hard to dodge and usually have much more finicky timing compared to normal attacks, but this is just Oh my god. I think it’s fine. Maybe I haven’t really gotten hit by it that much, so I think my complaints are kind of unwarranted, but damn is this timing finicky. Waiting for much, much longer than what you would ever expect, and then frantically spamming the link dodge seemed to work consistently for me. I mean, him being able to change the speed of his grab just feels a bit off to me. I kind of have an issue with it, but like I said, I didn’t get hit by it that much. I’m not really losing sleep over this attack. When you dodge it, it gives you a pretty long punish window, so that’s good. But if you get hit by it, then he’ll give you one of the hardest grab animations I’ve ever seen. And he has two of these. These animations are so damn good. And my god, do these do a lot of damage. His saws are the most dangerous thing about him. As to be expected, these attacks have very challenging timings to them. You can expect every single hit with his saw to be slightly more delayed than what you’d expect. Not to an obnoxious degree, but it takes a little getting used to. It is extremely punishing to be hit by these. And when he spins the blade, my god, this attack. I don’t like that you just kind of have to mindlessly spam the button to land the timing, but it looks really damn cool. And it’s very satisfying to guard in its own right. And it’s actually very oddly consistent to guard this attack in my experience. Despite there not being any form of telegraph to when you’re actually supposed to hit the button, it’s a pretty unique response. And I still found this attack to be pretty fun to guard. And it gives you a chance to deal a lot of damage to the saws so that you could break them. Oh, and I forgot to mention the break status. God, this boss is going to break me. This is like Mellennia with her Scarlet Rot because apparently the fight just wasn’t difficult enough. The break status is the least of my problems here. Well, I mean like problems to my health, not problems to the fight itself. It’s honestly the easiest thing about him to deal with. I think it adds a fair bit of status management to the fight, which we honestly haven’t really seen very much of with these bosses in the DLC. We had two decay boys. Well, more like one and a half. So, I don’t mind dealing with another boss that deals a form of status to me. And I think here it’s implemented in a very fair way. He can only apply break to you with a few of his attacks, which prioritizes you avoiding the ones that can apply the status. Whenever you see his hands get this red lightning and also every one of his saw attacks means that you really need to watch out for these in particular. If he applied it with every hit, then I would have an issue with it. But like this, I think it adds a fair bit of challenge that doesn’t involve his actual move set. and the telegraph is pretty obvious, so you’ll know which attack to prioritize. It’s just a little something to pay attention to. The break status itself isn’t oppressive enough for me to find it to be a huge problem. It feels fair. If it was shock, then it’d be a different story. I would have hated to deal with that. All of this makes him by far the hardest boss in the whole game, and it is not a contest, as it should be. This kind of difficulty was exactly what I was looking for with this DLC. I think it is really awesome that he feels very, very difficult, but still doesn’t feel unfair. And he makes me want to learn this fight in and out so I could beat him. After all of my time fighting him, I really feel like I was able to borderline master this fight and understand him. He feels properly tuned for a game with this type of fast pace. Can his phase 2 feel excessive? Yes, these can get really long sometimes, and if you’re too slow to the draw on your punish window, then that is rough. His phase 2 to me feels like it favors faster weapons. If you’re using a really slow weapon, I’m looking at you wrench users bonking your way to victory. You will likely have a pretty bad time in this fight. I don’t think it’s impossible because his punish windows are noticeable and decently reactable, but I tried fighting him with Simon’s weapon one time and it was really rough. But honestly, with enough preservation and getting used to his punish windows, I was actually able to make his weapon work pretty well. To me, Arleino felt a bit surprisingly more well tuned for slow weapons than a few other bosses like Nameless Puppet, Victor, and even Simon with his insane uptime, ambiguous recoveries, and magic spammy [ __ ] Fast weapons are favored, but not to an obnoxious degree, and I’m not exactly sure if this is even something that needs to be changed. I overall really do love his move set. Even if there are one or two attacks that I’m not a huge fan of. He’s animated amazingly. The effects are really nice looking and he is such a unique boss and it was so so incredibly satisfying to learn this boss for me. Now, I already glazed the hell out of Arlino’s elaborate buildup, but what about the story during the fight? I’m glad I asked. The story progression of this fight is also stellar. The dialogue is amazing and has more depth to it than any other boss in this game. Arlino, just like most human bosses in this game, they have some dialogue that you can say to Carlo. I think he has the most things that an enemy can actually say to Carlo, but conveniently and very very evily has one singular death line. Time to exit my stage. Time to exit my stage. Time to exit my stage. Time to exit my stage. Time to exit my Time to exit. Time to time to exit my stage. Wow, you really think you can win? That will be permanently scarred into your mind by the end of this fight. I really love that this boss has an actual personality to him. His taunts are really good and they get you in the same murderous mood that he is in. He makes you so badly want to bring him down a peg or seven. And also to get revenge for my boy Romeo. By the end of the fight, I was speaking to this boss like godamn Sepharoth because I was trying to bring him great despair and take away the thing he most cherishes. God, this is a bit much. The way he falls on the floor when you hit him with a fatal attack. Something about this is just so much more satisfying compared to any other fatal attack. Well, except that one, of course. He goes from a slight stumble to a laugh to an actual scream and grunt, then him flailing on the ground. I love this. After doing nothing but taunting and laughing at us in his first phase, in his second phase, he starts to waver. He’s still laughing and trying to taunt us, but he sounds noticeably more angry and frustrated with us, occasionally yelling enough and screaming in pain more often instead of just comedically saying ouch. It’s so satisfying to see this progression. Hearing him falter gives you so much more confidence. He also seems to be utterly confused as to what we exactly are. And out of all the research that he’s done, he hasn’t seen anything like us, which honestly sounds pretty cool to me. We are a human puppet hybrid that technically isn’t supposed to exist yet in the timeline. We are indeed a special puppet, and it makes me wonder how he would react to freaking Nameless Puppet. All of the story here is amazing and it feels like such a fantastic way to end the story, but there is one other thing that I think is the best part of the story. It’s when you get Leia involved. Now, the summon. Oh boy. The best possible summon you could get. The legendary stalker. Carlo finally being reunited with his teacher. And now we’re taking on one of Crot’s greatest evils. Using the summon here adds a lot to the story. So much to the point where I actually genuinely recommend helping her up on your first playthrough. The dialogue here is amazing, and I honestly believe you’d be missing out if you don’t see it. You do get a pretty satisfying story either way, but because you can’t summon her in the boss rematch, you should really see this on your first playthrough. This is the kind of motivation for summoning that I really, really like. And you can always refight him in the boss rematch if you want to fight him solo. When you’re by yourself, you could see it as Carlo taking things into his own hands and not allowing Leia to be hurt any further. All of Arleino’s dialogue will be directed at you with Carlo just simply not responding to Arlino’s taunts like he normally would. He keeps his composure the whole time while fighting him. Even in his second phase, Arleino does not stop taunting us and eventually saying how he sees emotions in us deep down. As a story beat for Carlo, this is honestly fantastic. His humanity is always being put into question. Can he truly be human? Can he really feel emotions? Despite seeming composed in this fight and the rest of the game, maybe Carlo deep down is truly feeling nervous or scared for Romeo and Leia. Maybe he really is feeling lonely because of all the people he lost. And Arleino can see this. Arleino, who in the base game believes that puppets are as human as anyone. We don’t truly know how Carlo is feeling. It’s mostly up to how you interpret it, which that is the way that I did. You’ll get a satisfying story for Carlo if you don’t help Leia. When you do pick her up, Arleino’s dialogue changes focus from you to only Leia. He only talks to Carlo in a passing remark. Leia completely steals the spotlight from you, and it makes sense. I actually do prefer this. In the DLC, we’re following Leia. This is just as much as her story as it is ours, if not more so. Carlos’s journey was in the base game with that culminating into his fight with the nameless puppet. Leia’s story ends here with a rebuilt Arlino returning for his revenge. And she has help from her finally reunited apprentice who she thought she would never see again. Leia’s voice actor killed it with this role. She was so damn good. The emotions you feel from her in front of the candle sculpture and seeing Romeo’s arms was such good emotional storytelling. All of this culminates into her anger and her revenge. Wanting Arlleino not only dead but [ __ ] suffering. You can hear it in her voice. She wants to inflict the same pain that he inflicted onto others and Romeo. And that’s what we plan on doing. You puppet. I will kill you if it’s the last thing I do. Ouch. Another cinematic fatal hit and it’s only with Leia. This is so perfect. a team attack with our teacher and Carlo freaking punches him which is so great. I love everything about Leia’s inclusion in the fight and in the story. It is the best inclusion of a summon or NPC in a boss battle that I have ever seen in these games. This guy is everything that I wanted the final boss to be with his design, his difficulty, his move set, the visuals, the arena, the story. What a fantastic way to cap things off once again. I was fun while it lasted. [Laughter] ranking time. Tyrannical Predator. A very nice way to start the DLC. The way he pops out of the cave like that, it’s really cool to have a main boss be a surprise encounter like this. His design looks great, and he’s a fitting way to close out the zoo. The sounds he makes are really awesome, and this fight is pretty epic. His move set is complex and very unique. He has a lot of slams that are satisfying to guard and some quick biting combos to mix it up. A couple of his moves have some awkward timings to them. He has a couple of springy delayed attacks that can be kind of annoying, and his charging attacks give me anxiety every time I try to dodge them, but that’s about it. This fight was very solid overall and should definitely be put in the boss rematch. A tier, Mariona, the puppeteer of death. She has a very neat arena and a very classy design and her music is very nice. This is a very interesting take on a dual boss. Instead of juggling them, you only need to switch between them when the string changes color like a tag team. I really do like this because we already have a traditional gank fight in the form of the Black Ribbit Brotherhood, so having a more unique dual fight like this is great. Mariana’s attacks are very dancelike and graceful and makes for a nice feeling and flow to her fight. Her attacks are very fun to avoid. The puppet is a bit more on the awkward side with a more limited move set and deceptively awkward delays, but I don’t feel they ruin the fight. The puppet’s inclusion is welcome and both of them together make for a very unique encounter. Her phase 2 adds some spectacle to the fight with these ultimate attacks. I really enjoyed perfect guarding these and I really enjoyed this fight as a whole. S tier Vinique, the leader of the sweepers. The first of only two stalker battles, which isn’t a lot, but they definitely went for quality over quantity with these because this is by far the best stalker fight I fought so far. She has an incredibly badass weapon that you cannot get. And she has a decent amount of unique moves. This fight is incredibly hectic. She attacks really fast and it’s really satisfying to guard her combos. Her combos are pretty long and she’s decently aggressive, but she isn’t excessive. She doesn’t have too much else going on with her design and arena, though. She’s just a fun little boss with a fun move set in between the main bosses. B tier, the two-faced Overseer. This was such an amazing duel. His animations are so smooth, and his attacks are some of the most well telegraphed attacks in the game. It gives his fight such an amazing flow, and he’s really fun to parry. He honestly has some of the most fun combos to parry in the game. He has an interesting mechanic where he becomes enraged, which is basically a phase two that he switches to. The pace picks up and his combos get more fun to parry and they still feel well telegraphed and fair. His attacks feel fair, but his health and damage are debatable. It almost feels like he’s a full new game plus ahead of your scaling. While it can be frustrating to have all your boss progress wiped out in about two hits, one thing that I like that this brings is the pressure to break his weapon. Normally, this mechanic is optional, but here it actually forced me to use it, which made it feel very satisfying to break his weapon. It was a very interesting interaction, and I was very surprised by this fight. top of a tier pre- metamorphic green hunter. I still cannot believe this guy was actually made that they remade the boss that has the most amount of players frustrated. It’s so damn funny. The way you find him is pretty cool. He’s an optional secret boss. You have to pay attention to when you hear the scream and then drop off at this one point at the elevator in the Argo mines. Aside from the encounter in the first place, the fight itself is pretty forgettable. His move set is filled with tons of awkward delays, and he is somehow more chaotic than the original green monster. I couldn’t really get a hold of this fight in a satisfying way or get into any real flow state with him. Some of his combos can be fun, but the pacing just felt so off. It was nice to learn a little bit more about the green monster, though. Eh, top of C tier. The anguished guardian of the ruins. This was an incredibly badass fight. His design is really cool, and it’s really nice to have a colossal fight like this. His arena is awesome as well, and the music is so epic. His fight is so unique in this game. His moves are well telegraphed and feel great to avoid. Despite his attacks being more on the delayed side, his animations are really smooth, and it makes his attacks fun to parry. The fight has a really nice slow rhythm with the occasional faster combo with his trident to mix it up. His phase change is short and sweet. He gets a goddamn dragon laser, which is awesome, and his spear gets imbued with magic, which also looks really cool. This adds a fun little positioning element to his attacks while making his combos more complex and adding more spectacle. This fight looked awesome and was so fun to play. S tier. Lumakio, the leader of the bastards. Awesome and unexpected entrance. Love the surprise battles. His move set is probably the most unique of any stalker fight. He’s very tricky and more strategic. He does less charging directly at you and instead tosses bombs at you from a distance, uses smoke grenades to obscure his movements, and uses umbrella to block your attacks. This forces you to be more careful and precise with your actions. His basic swings look a bit floaty and awkward, but this was still a very fun fight and was honestly pretty difficult. This is the only stalker battle with a second phase, which makes him rather unique. We get to see the elixir from the alchemist work in real time and it turns him into a really unique looking monster. The fight completely changes. Throw all that stuff about tactics and strategy right out the window. He charges at you mindlessly and becomes far more aggressive and unpredictable. A very nice act of karma for betraying us. All in all, I found this fight to be good and it’s so nice to see how much they’ve improved these stalker battles. Honestly, really hard to choose which one I like more. I guess right below Verinique Arlino the blood artist. I honestly cannot believe what they’ve done with this guy. Really cool looking arena with my favorite boss theme in the DLC. The best story and buildup in the game and maybe any Souls game that I’ve seen. Taking one of the most fun characters from the base game and turning him into the most metal and insane boss in the game. His story with Leia is amazing and elevates both of them. His design is amazingly uncanny and the voice actor is so so good. Both of them fit his character perfectly. His first phase move set is absolutely insane and very fast. The fastest and one of the most challenging fights in the game. His combos are incredibly difficult to guard, but when you get into a rhythm with it, you’ll be guarding so many hits and it’s so satisfying. He has tons of different moves, combo extenders. His fight has such an interesting flow and his move set has so much personality to it. And he’s extremely difficult, but he doesn’t feel unfair. His combos are very long, but he also has decently long recoveries as well. He also flinches quite a bit, which allows you to interrupt his combos, so he doesn’t feel excessive. This fight is extremely difficult, but he doesn’t feel unfair. He has my favorite phase transition in the game with a nice little horror redesign and the craziest opening attack that I’ve seen in this game. I liked his first phase a lot, but this one I actually like more. He relies less on rapid attacks, and the difficulty comes from more trickier timings. The effects on his attacks look great, and they’re animated amazingly. His buzz saws are so damn cool and offer some more unique attacks. This boss is everything that a final boss should be. A fantastic and insanely difficult boss to end the DLC on. One of my favorite final bosses and one of my favorite Souls bosses of all time. This choice was honestly really difficult for me, but I have to put Arlleino at top of S tier. And here are the final rankings. Even though I talked about less bosses in this video, I felt like I went over so much more stuff than the first video. I really did like making this one. I think even more so than I did making the first one. Honestly, I really loved this DLC and I loved going over these bosses. I cannot tell you enough how surprising this game’s quality was in every aspect. And this is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s in top five at least. I don’t like every single thing this game did, and I don’t like every single boss, but I just really liked how everything in this game culminated into what it is. Everything in this game just feels like it has some kind of purpose to the narrative, lore, or gameplay, and this game was such an interesting experience, and I really like this game’s iteration on the Soulslike gameplay. I am so glad to have played this game, and I am so happy with what it has done to help me start my channel. Thank you all for watching, and thank you for the support on my first video and motivating me to make this one. I hope it was even better than the first one. And now I will once again be waiting eagerly for Neoiz and Round 8 to release their sequel to this game and then they suddenly release it the day after the video goes up. No, it won’t happen. But I will be watching for whenever they decide to announce anything about the sequel. And I will very likely make some kind of video on it when it comes out. I am very confident in them that it will at least be as good as this game, if not better. In the meantime, I’m going to try to find other games and other topics to make videos on. They’re not going to only be on Souls games, though. But I do have a few more ideas on some FromSoft games that I’d like to do. I’ll see what the future has in store for me. [Music]

This DLC was so surprising and amazing to me. In this video I give my thoughts on the bosses, what they do well and ways that I think they could improve while trying to be constructive with my criticism.

Timestamps –
Intro – 0:00
Build stuff – 3:43
Tyrannical Predator – 10:20
Markiona, Puppeteer of Death – 22:27
Veronique The Leader of the Sweepers – 37:59
Two Faced Overseer – 43:56
Premetamorphic Green Hunter – 58:15
Anguished Guardian of the Ruins – 1:04:19
Lummachio The Leader of Bastard – 1:19:51
Arlecchino, The Blood Artist – 1:26:27
Ranking – 2:10:29
Outro – 2:17:51